New York boasts the world’s biggest St Patrick’s Day parade, with 150,000 people marching, while Dublin’s parade takes second position.

Birmingham has a large Irish community - dating back to the Industrial Revolution when Irish people moved here to work in construction and factories - and is estimated to have the largest Irish population in the UK.

Today, many Irish people also live in other areas such as Hall Green and Erdington.

The Irish community have had a written record of their existence in Birmingham since the 1600s.

By the 1990s, there were more than 70,000 people living in the city who were born in Ireland, and in 2002 there were 38,000.

In 2009, a Birmingham City Council analysis of National Statistics Office data on ethnic groups estimated there were about 22,000 Irish people in Birmingham, while there were 61,000 in the whole of the West Midlands.

More than half the Irish people in Birmingham were of pensionable age.